Any approach to the study of managerial situations undertaken without reflection on the underpinning philosophy is flawed because it limits our ability to question the validity of the knowledge claimed in the analysis. The paper considers this issue and presents a philosophical reflection on the use of a systems approach to the modelling of human enterprises. It draws on insights from systems thinking, cognitive science, autopoiesis, communication theory and non-linear dynamics. These are interpreted within the context of social systems (...) as networks of conversations that are generated in language. It is written to invite an exchange of ideas concerning the role of the generative dialogue. (shrink)

The central concern of this article is whether the semantic approach has the resources to appropriately capture the core tenets of structural realism. Chakravartty (2001) has argued that a realist notion of correspondence cannot be accommodated without introducing a linguistic component, which undermines the approach itself. We suggest that this worry can be addressed by an appropriate understanding of the role of language in this context. The real challenge, however, is how to incorporate the core notion of `explanatory (...) approximate truth' in such a way that the emphasis on structure is retained. (shrink)

Inspired by a postgraduate French studies conference (University of Nottingham, 10 September 2008), this volume explores linguistic form and content in relation to a variety of contexts, considering language alongside music, images, theatre, human experience of the world, and another language. Each essay asks what it is to understand language in a given context, and how, in spite of divergent expressive possibilities, a linguistic situation interacts with other contexts, renegotiating boundaries and redefining understanding. The book (...) lies at the intersection of linguistics and hermeneutics, seeking to (a) contextualise philosophical and linguistic discussions of communication across a range of media and (b) illustrate their intimate relations, despite differing strategies or emphases. Puisant son inspiration dans un colloque de French studies pour doctorants (Université de Nottingham, 10 septembre 2008), cet ouvrage étudie forme et contenu linguistiques en relation avec différents contextes, considérant le langage conjointement avec la musique, les images, le théâtre, l'expérience du monde et un autre langage. Chaque chapitre dissèque la compréhension du langage dans un contexte donné, et se demande comment, en dépit de possibilités expressives divergentes, une situation linguistique interagit avec d'autres contextes, redessinant leurs frontières et redéfinissant la compréhension. Ce livre, situé à l'intersection entre la linguistique et l'herméneutique, a pour but de (a) contextualiser les discussions philosophiques et linguistiques sur la communication dans une gamme de médias et (b) démontrer leur relation intime, malgré des stratégies ou intentions différentes. (shrink)

An important challenge in bilingualism research is to understand the mechanisms underlying sentence processing in a second language and whether they are comparable to those underlying native processing. Here, we focus on verb-particle constructions (VPCs) that are among the most difficult elements to acquire in L2 English. The verb and the particle form a unit, which often has a non-compositional meaning (e.g., look up or chew out), making the combined structure semantically opaque. However, bilinguals with higher levels of English (...) proficiency can develop a good knowledge of the semantic properties of verb-particle constructions (Blais and Gonnerman, 2013). A second difficulty is that in a sentence context, the particle can be shifted after the direct object of the verb, (e.g., The professor looked it up). The processing is more challenging when the object is long (e.g. The professor looked the student’s last name up.). This shifted structure favors syntactic processing at the expense of VPC semantic processing. We sought to determine whether or not bilinguals’ reading time (RT) patterns would be similar to those observed for native monolinguals (Gonnerman and Hayes, 2005) when reading VPCs in sentential contexts. French-English bilinguals were tested for English language proficiency, working memory and explicit VPC semantic knowledge. During a self-paced reading task, participants read 78 sentences with verb-particle constructions that varied according to parameters that influence native speakers’ reading dynamics: verb-particle transparency, particle adjacency and length of the object noun phrase (NP; 2, 3, or 5 words). RTs in a critical region that included verbs, NPs and particles were measured. Results revealed that RTs were modulated by participants’ English proficiency, with higher proficiency associated with shorter RTs. Examining participants’ explicit semantic knowledge of VPCs and working memory, only readers with more native-like knowledge of VPCs and a high working memory presented RT patterns that were similar to those of monolinguals. Therefore, given the necessary lexical and computational resources, bilingual processing of novel structures at the syntax-semantics interface follows the principles influencing native processing. The findings are in keeping with theories that postulate similar representations and processing in L1 and L2 modulated by processing difficulty. (shrink)

Linguistics, Anthropology and Philosophy in the French Enlightenment treats the development of linguistic thought from Descartes to Degerando as both a part of and a determining factor in the emergence of modern consciousness. Through his careful analyses of works by the most influential thinkers of the time, author Ulrich Ricken demonstrates that the central significance of language in the philosophy of the enlightenment is how it reflected and acted upon contemporary understanding of humanity as a whole. Although primarily (...) focused on French thought between 1650 and 1800, the author discusses contemporary developments in England, Germany and Italy and covers an unusually broad range of writers and ideas, including Leibniz, Wolff, Herder and Humboldt. This study places the history of language philosophy within the broader context of the history of ideas, aesthetics and historical anthropology and will be of interest to scholars working in these disciplines. (shrink)

Jean-Claude Milner’s Le sage trompeur (2013), a controversial recent piece of French Spinoza literature, remains regrettably understudied in the English-speaking world. Adopting Leo Strauss’ esoteric reading method, Milner alleges that Spinoza dissimulates his genuine analysis of the causes of the persecution and survival of the Jewish people within a brief “manifesto” found at the end of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), Chapter 3. According to Milner, Spinoza holds that the Jewish people themselves are responsible for the hatred of the Jewish (...) people, and that the engine of their longevity is the hatred they engender. Additionally, claims Milner, Spinoza covertly insinuates that the solution to this persistent state of hatred consists in the mass apostasy of the Jewish people under the leadership of a Sabbatai Zevi-like figure. This article presents the Milner–Spinoza controversy to the English-speaking public along with the larger context of French-language scholarship on Spinoza’s relation to Judaism. While refuting Milner’s reading of Spinoza, I simultaneously clarify relevant elements of Spinoza’s discussions of Judaism in the TTP, such as Spinoza’s examination of Jewish identity and the nature of divine election, Spinoza’s understanding of the causes of national hatred, and Spinoza’s appeals to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish political history. (shrink)

Après avoir fait l’état des lieux de la base de données VALIBEL en la situant dans son contexte institutionnel, nous mettons en exergue dans cet article quelques possibilités d’investigation qu’offre la base en regard de ses évolutions récentes. Une attention particulière est portée à l’outillage des corpus en termes de disfluences (avec le programme DisMo) et à l’étude du vieillissement langagier (liée au corpus Corpage). Nous concluons en montrant en quoi l’enrichissement constant de la base (en outillage et en corpus) (...) permet d’ouvrir de nouvelles pistes de recherches dans des domaines encore peu explorés en linguistique, eu égard à des problématiques sociétales majeures. (shrink)

French culture is unique in that philosophy has played a significant role from the early-modern period onwards, intimately associated with political, religious, and literary debates, as well as with epistemological and scientific ones. While Latin was the language of learning there was a universal philosophical literature, but with the rise of vernacular literatures things changed and a distinctive national form of philosophy arose in France. This Very Short Introduction covers French philosophy from its origins in the sixteenth (...) century up to the present, analysing it within its social, political, and cultural context. Beginning with psychology and epistemology, Stephen Gaukroger and Knox Peden then move onto the emergence of radical philosophy in the eighteenth century, before considering post-revolutionary philosophy in the nineteenth century, philosophy in the world wars, the radical thought of the 1960s, and finally French philosophy today. Throughout, they explore the dilemma sustained by the markedly national conception of French philosophy, and its history of speaking out on matters of universal concern. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable. -- Provided by publisher. (shrink)

In this article, we perform an evidential analysis of three types of construction taken from essays written by students of French as a foreign language: the shown source, the quoted source and borrowed knowledge. The issue with these constructions, which refer to passages from a book, is knowing the extent to which they have an evidential value because, within the context of our analysis, the source and the knowledge reference overlap. We defend an evidential reading of these (...) segments given their argumentative function in the students’ discourse. We perform a pragmatic analysis of these language forms that take into account the parameters of the communicative situation and the type of text that the students have to produce. Our hypothesis is this: the figure of the teacher and his or her instructions have a direct impact on the way in which the student presents his or her knowledge of the book on which he or she is commenting. The analysis of the function of these three forms has also led us to address the issue of the relationship between evidentiality and notions like the reliability and epistemic modality. We conclude that source is a reliability’s character and an epistemic function in the discourse. (shrink)

Language experience clearly affects the perception of speech, but little is known about whether these differences in perception extend to non-speech sounds. In this study, we investigated rhythmic perception of non-linguistic sounds in speakers of French and German using a grouping task, in which complexity was manipulated. In this task, participants grouped sequences of auditory chimeras formed from musical instruments. These chimeras mimic the complexity of speech without being speech. We found that, while showing the same overall grouping (...) preferences, the German speakers showed stronger biases than the French speakers in grouping complex sequences. Sound variability reduced all participants’ biases, resulting in the French group showing no grouping preference for the most variable sequences, though this reduction was attenuated by musical experience. In sum, this study demonstrates that linguistic experience, musical experience, and complexity affect rhythmic grouping of non-linguistic sounds and suggests that experience with acoustic cues in a meaningful context is necessary for developing a robust grouping preference that survives acoustic variability. (shrink)

Abstract:The introduction of the kilometer in nineteenth-century Europe, within a context of broader processes of standardization and capitalism and the proliferation of maps and railways, has been associated with the disembodiment, deindividuation and decontextualization of travel. This article offers a critique of this notion by examining the various meanings different units of distance had for travelers; to what extent these units were related to the body and the physical activity of travel; and whether these relations changed between the 1770s (...) and 1910s. Focusing on texts of instruction and texts about travelers' own journeys, written in the Dutch, German, English and French languages, the article argues that a number of more embodied ways of describing distances survived alongside more standardized measures. (shrink)

This essay adopts a semiotic perspective focused on practices of communication, movement, and translation to examine the global impact of A. J. Greimas and his oeuvre. The linguist and semiotician’s lecture trips abroad, the number and provenance of international students in his Paris seminar, and the chronology and linguistic geography of translations of his work help describe, gauge, and explain the dissemination and development of his ideas throughout the world. His project has engendered distinctive appropriations and at times productive institutional (...) structures in a number of cultural and linguistic contexts, notably Romance, Anglo-American, Germanic, Russian, Lithuanian, and Chinese. The broader historical relations between France and other lands, and the extent of each society’s use of the French language have conditioned, fostered, or impeded responses to his proposals. The conclusion’s discussion of the relative importance of personal contacts, socio-historical context, and the sociolinguistic and pedagogical status of French for his international reception aims to contribute to general methodological debates in the history of science and ideas and in transnational history. (shrink)

French thinkers have revolutionized European thought about knowledge, religion, politics, and society. Delivering a comprehensive history of thought in France from the Middle Ages to the present, this book follows themes and developments of thought across the centuries. It provides readers with studies of both systematic thinkers and those who operate less systematically, through essays or fragments, and places them all in their many contexts. Informed by up-to-date research, these accessible chapters are written by prominent experts in their fields (...) who investigate key concepts in non-technical language. Chapters feature treatments of specific thinkers as individuals including Voltaire, Rousseau, Descartes and Derrida, but also more general movements and schools of thought from humanism to liberalism, via the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Marxism, and feminism. Furthermore, the influence of gender, race, empire and slavery are investigated to offer a broad and fulfilling account of French thought throughout the ages. (shrink)

This essay explores the intricate challenges surrounding the concept of religious signs in the context of secular French schools through a social-semiotic lens, drawing inspiration from Michael Halliday's Systemic-Functional Linguistics. It delves into the interplay of language and society, shedding light on three crucial metafunctions: ideational, interpersonal, and textual. The ideational function investigates how religious signs serve as semiotic tools for representing the world and interpreting human experiences. The interpersonal function helps to examine how these signs foster (...) reaction among diverse groups within the school community. Furthermore, the essay scrutinizes the textual function's role in weaving these two functions into coherent discourse, enabling (or not) effective communication. Through an examination of these linguistic components, this essay unravels the complexities of navigating religious signs in French schools, providing insights into the broader socio-cultural dynamics and challenges faced in reconciling diverse religious perspectives with a secular educational system. (shrink)

_The Languages of Psyche_ traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts—science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.

This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition (externalism, mental causation, resemblance, habits, sensory awareness, the psychology, illusion, representationalism), concepts (universal, transcendental, identity, syncategorematic), logic and language (definitions, (...) syllogisms, modality, supposition, obligationes, et cetera), action theory (belief, will, action), and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio's former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. (shrink)

The aim of this research paper is to examine Latin in the context of legal translation between the Polish, English and French languages. Latin ap- pears in contemporary legal discourse in the form of maxims, short phrases and terms. Even though it constitutes an integral element of legal drafting, Latin often attracts little attention from legal translators. It is falsely assumed that Latin elements of the text do not require translation due to several miscon- ceptions related to the (...) Latin language. Firstly, Latin is generally perceived as a global language with no local variations in form. Secondly, Latin is believed to be the universal point of reference in international communication. Thirdly, Latin legal phrases or maxims are thought to originate solely from Roman law, thus they express only Roman legal thought. In the first part of the paper we will address the above issues. To this end, we will briefly discuss the historical presence of Latin in the European lin- guistic context. We will then present the results of our research into the use of Latinisms in the Polish, French and English legal systems. The subject of our research was a set of twenty Latin maxims and phrases that frequently appear in the decisions of the Polish courts. During the first stage of the analysis, the items in question were verified in Legalis. The second stage of the research involved the consultation of monolingual dictionaries of French and English legal language to verify the universal charac- ter of the analyzed Latinisms. During the third stage of the analysis, we looked at the practical use of Latinisms in online databases of legal texts. The paper concludes with some comments on Latinisms in lexicographical publications and online sources. (shrink)

By placing Hume’s account of communication in the context of some less known seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French resources on rhetoric and language, this essay argues that Hume based his und...

This article presents the first detailed analysis of the ways in which border-crossing author and balladeer John Jones (pseudonym ‘Jac Glan-y-Gors’) remodelled a range of Thomas Paine’s writings into Welsh republican pamphlets by translating key passages, interpolating culturally relevant indigenous material, and consolidating Paine’s anti-monarchical core vocabulary. In doing so, the article provides a blueprint for examining the operation of intellectual networks who transferred ideas and cultural artefacts to smaller or non-hegemonic cultures and the process of embedding them. Jones’s work (...) is analysed against the history of an early modern Welsh ‘translation culture’ that enabled a substantial expansion of radical translation activity, in tandem with the democratisation of the English press in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, transferring Enlightenment and revolutionary artefacts, formats and ideas to Wales and the Welsh language. Using publishing networks that linked metropolitan London to rural Wales, an indigenous Welsh intelligentsia combined English models with indigenous cultural forms to produce a radical print culture in their own language. Jones’s republican pamphlets, the only substantial reception of Paine’s writings in Welsh, are read in the context of these processes. (shrink)

This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition, concepts, logic and language, action theory, and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions (...) in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio’s former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. (shrink)

Rarely is the problem of the diversity of languages taken into account whenever population groups are formed into States. When the problem does come up, it is later, in a primarily political context which tries to find political solutions, such as we may presently see them in Canada or in Belgium for instance. These solutions are few and they deal with situations that may contain a host of nuances.Certain countries have chosen a vehicular language while keeping their local (...) languages: the common language in the USSR is the language of one of its republics. In Senegal it is French, which is of a totally foreign origin but has the advantage of avoiding the rivalry existing among the native languages, and it also has a place within the international community. Other countries have accepted as official languages the different languages spoken within its borders. Thus Switzerland is officially tri-lingual (French, German, Italian), giving legal status to what somewhere else may simply be an accepted fact. Many Alsatians speak three languages (Alsatian, French, German). As far as it concerns countries with a strong linguistic heterogeneity, whether it be their history or their size making for a centralizing policy, they have adopted, with the resulting neglect of all others, the language or the idiom of the region which was politically or culturally the dominant one at the time of their unification. Pekinese has been extended to all of China, Florentine to Italy, Hindi to India. Some original combinations can be found: in Israel Jewish immigrants who came from more than seventy different countries, have again taken up the nation's old cultural and religious language, which had been out of use for two thousand years, and have placed it on equal footing with Arabic spoken by the local population, while English is being used for international relations. (shrink)

Historians of science have only just begun to sample the wealth of different approaches to the study of animal behavior undertaken in the twentieth century. To date, more attention has been given to Lorenzian ethology and American behaviorism than to other work and traditions, but different approaches are equally worthy of the historian's attention, reflecting not only the broader range of questions that could be asked about animal behavior and the "animal mind" but also the different contexts in which these (...) questions were important. One such approach is that represented by the work of the French zoologist Louis Boutan (1859-1934). This paper explores the intellectual and cultural history of Boutan's work on animal language and the animal mind, and contextualizes the place of animal behavior studies within late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French biology. I explore the ways in which Boutan addressed the philosophical issue of whether language was necessary for abstract thought and show how he shifted from the idea that animals were endowed with a purely affective language to the notion that of they were capable of "rudimentary" reasoning. I argue that the scientific and broader socio-cultural contexts in which Boutan operated played a role in this transition. Then I show how Boutan's linguistic and psychological experiments with a gibbon and children provide insights into his conception of "naturalness." Although Boutan reared his gibbon at home and studied it in the controlled environment of his laboratory, he continued to identify its behavior as "natural." I specifically demonstrate the importance of the milieu of the French Third Republic in shaping Boutan's understanding not only of animal intelligence and child education, but also his definition of nature. Finally, I argue that Boutan's studies on the primate mind provide us with a lens through which we can examine the co-invention of animal and child psychology in early-twentieth-century France. (shrink)

When Thomas Luckmann, a pioneer of the “linguistic turn” in sociology, regarded Émile Durkheim as a source for the sociology of language, he had lifeworldly community–building in mind. However, the French sociologist himself understood language in the context ofcivil society–building. To Durkheim, language was a “social thing in the highest degree” that enabled general ideas and intermediated them to people. Abstract human ideals like the civil religion since the French Revolution could be shared through (...) (a common) language. Thus, Durkheim took the exclusive use of French in the Third Republic’s laic public education for granted, ignoring the patois in the country: This “child of the Enlightenment” considered French to be a universal language ofGesellschaftand, beyond ethno-communal elements, to work as a basis for the organic solidarity of French national civil society where the social division of labor was progressing. Durkheim’s theory was predicated on civil-linguistic, not ethnolinguistic, nationalism. (shrink)

This article examines the history of cybernetics in France, and the history of French cybernetics in the context of the emergent field of the history of cybernetics. Drawing upon an unfamiliar group of intellectuals and sources, I discuss the way in which French cybernetics was not primarily the hyper-philosophical strain we have come to associate with names such as Derrida and Lévi-Strauss, but an approach to thinking through political and social problems that some on the left would (...) even deign to call pragmatic. In particular, I follow a group of intellectuals known as the Groupe des dix, who, in the aftermath of the tumult of May ‘68, formed an interdisciplinary think tank to try to work out how to bridge the gap between science and society. In order to facilitate conversations between politicians, philosophers, biologists, and sociologists (to name just a few of the represented disciplines), the Groupe reached for a language that was supposed to be truly omnidisciplinary: that of cybernetics. And they did so in a country where cybernetics was not properly represented as a laboratory science. On this last point, this paper makes an addition to the history of cybernetics by offering a portrait not of cybernetics in action, but of cybernetics in vulgarization. Not that the Groupe would not make their own stamp on politics: Several of them still hold significant power in adjudicating the role of science and technology in the public sphere in the French state. (shrink)

The article seeks to refute the popular idea in Russian-language scientific literature of French personalism as a homogeneous and monolithic movement, briefly pointing out the existence of three of its internal movements: Esprit, Ordre Nouveau and Jeune Droite. Focusing on the figure of D. de Rougemont, this study nevertheless shows the close connection between these three groups and the commonality of ideological quests. Dwelling in detail on the confessional context of the differences between Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, (...) the author demonstrates that both groups are still united in the perception of the concept of “personality” as a spiritual imperative for a person in the 1930s (albeit not agreeing on some details of its definition) and criticism of contemporary political regimes. (shrink)

This article discusses the impact of the local context on the implementation of a teaching practice observation protocol. It explores the methodological adaptations made within the framework of a collaborative research in professional didactics in French Polynesia. This research, aimed at involving teachers in the shared analysis of their own teaching activity of “Polynesian languages and culture”, required taking into account their context of engagement in order to reinvent a research approach meeting the needs of the researcher (...) as well as those of the teachers. Taking into account their respective cultural backgrounds, it allowed a conceptual widening of the theoretical field founding the approach. (shrink)

We were interested in exploring the associations and effects of experimental language (i.e., native – L1, or foreign – L2), dilemma type (i.e., personal – D1 or impersonal – D2), the digital device participants used (i.e., PC/laptop or smartphone), along with gender and age in sacrificial COVID-19 and non-COVID moral dilemmas. We performed two studies involving 522 participants aged 18 to 69 in April 2020. In Study 1, we found no significant associations between the dilemma type and the digital (...) device. However, most participants chose to sacrifice an older COVID-19 patient in a critical medical condition to prioritize rescuing similar, younger patients (i.e., 45-year-old males). Results also suggested that male and younger participants were more likely to choose the utilitarian option when the sacrificial dilemma was presented in French. In study 2 (i.e., non-COVID-19), participants made significantly more utilitarian choices in the personal dilemmas presented in French. Results are discussed concerning the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic context and its emotional impact on moral judgment. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not (...) take its wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

In many languages, common nouns are divided into two morpho-syntactic subclasses, count nouns and mass nouns. Yet in certain contexts, count nouns can be used as if they were mass nouns. This linguistic phenomenon is called conversion. In this paper, we consider the conversions of count nouns into mass nouns in French. First, we identify a general semantic constraint that must be respected in these conversions, and various cases in which a count noun can be used as a mass (...) noun. Second, we examine the effects that semantic and pragmatic factors play in their interpretation. More precisely, we try to determine whether there are specific conventions for interpreting count -> mass conversions in French. Several arguments are discussed, having to do with considerations of theoretical economy, so-called "ambiguity tests", differences among languages as to what interpretations are available for conversions, and the strong feeling of conventionality of some uses. This leads us to postulate the existence of a number of specific conventions for interpreting conversions in French. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present an educative experience carried out in a university context, in order to discuss of the ways that peer tutoring could contribute to the development of the pedagogical skills of future and novice teachers of French as a Foreign Language. The aforementioned case study lasted throughout an academic semester and involved undergraduate and graduate students.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 575 Geneviève Pagé Gender at the Crossing: Ideological Travelings of US and French Thought in Montreal Feminism This article recounts a story about Montreal feminism using the narrative thread of its conceptual language. It is a story of language as a political choice that guides our actions, but also language as a political issue, (...) a barrier, a tool that structures our thinking and that reflects and reproduces relations of power in knowledge production and dissemination. Gender is the central character in this story—its role representing the way US, French, and Quebec theoretical traditions are deeply in dialogue with each other; yet this dialogue is arbitrary and filled with long silences. In reviewing the dialogue, this article identifies a few elements that play a significant role in favoring or impeding the traveling of ideas and concepts, focusing, in the case of Quebec, on how part of the feminist movement, comprised of radical or “revolutionary” feminists, engages with and constructs theory. The article begins by briefly tracing the evolving meanings of gender in the United States from the 1920s to the twenty-first century. Then, turning to France, a second section identifies elements limiting the traveling of US understandings of gender in French feminist theory, especially the predominance of specific traditions of thought, namely existentialism and Marxism, leading to different ways of thinking about oppression, patriarchy, sexism, and the idea of womanhood. In a third section, I shift the focus to Quebec, particularly Francophone Montreal, to survey its feminist thought, political traditions, and 576 Geneviève Pagé translation. Its history, its people, and its geographic location put it at the convergence of US and French influences, but with a distinct added local imperative: the struggle for national liberation. The specific ways in which Quebec nationalism has foregrounded power and politics around language has had a major impact on how Quebec feminists have negotiated relations with their southern feminist neighbors. In this sense, Quebec feminism presents an excellent case study of language operating as an axis of power. Furthermore, in the context of globalization and resistances to globalizing processes, Montreal provides a perfect example by which to highlight both transnational influences and local specificities. Montreal, as a classic example of Mary Louise Pratt’s cultural and linguistic “contact zone”—the space where communities of practices interact—is a city in which one can clearly identify “the intellectual and linguistic points of contact between cultures, and make visible the political pressure that activates them.”1 I treat translations that occur in this context as the process of connecting and communicating between communities. As queer theorist Juana María Rodríguez has noted in another context, “the process of translation involves more than merely translating languages; it involves translating cultures, values, and institutions of power.”2 Similarly, translation here involves an exchange between symbolic and semiotic structures of both the original and the new communities. Zooming out of Montreal, I then address the politics of translation on a more global scale, pointing out the particular ways the production and dissemination of knowledge is especially beholden to market relations. All these reflections help us understand the traveling of ideas, concepts, and ideologies across linguistic barriers. I conclude that it is in the interest of feminists to pay particular attention to what knowledge is produced from different standpoints and in different languages and what it can teach us. 1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 34; Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (New York: Routledge, 1996), 36. 2. Juana María Rodríguez, Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York: NYU Press, 2003), 19. Geneviève Pagé  577 Gender in the United States It is among US feminists that the conceptualization of the gender/sex dichotomy first developed. However, gender—the word—ironically comes to English from the French genre and shares with that word its derivation from the Latin genus, meaning “kind,” “sort,” or “type.” The derivation is most visible in the borrowing in English of the French genre, for example, in literary forms such as fiction or poetry. Similarly, both the English... (shrink)

This study focuses on the acquisition of the two basic relational functions of the French address pronouns: tu for solidarity with friends and vous for deference with an unknown person or a known person with higher social status. Previous research has found that L2 learners of French become more target-like in their choice between tu and vous when they spend time in a French community. This is due to the fact that study-abroad offers L2 learners exposure to (...) naturalistic interaction involving native speakers of the target language. Our study reports findings from a cross-sectional study of language practices outside the classroom and the productive use of the pronouns in a role-play task by 24 Ghanaian L2 French learners. Half of them had learnt L2 French in Ghana while the other half had spent 9 additional months in France. The findings show that the distribution of address pronouns in L2 French is significantly different from the distribution of address pronouns in L1 French. But there are no significant differences between the two groups of learners. The analysis of reported language practices, interaction with native and non-native speakers and exposure to radio and films in both contexts show that appropriate use of address pronouns is not related to the amount of interaction outside the classroom or exposure to media, be they in the ‘at home’ context or during study abroad context. This study suggests that factors other than exposure are at play in the acquisition of the relational function of address pronouns. (shrink)

This paper examines whether adults can adapt to novel accents of their native language that contain unfamiliar context-dependent phonological alternations. In two experiments, French participants listen to short stories read in accented speech. Their knowledge of the accents is then tested in a forced-choice identification task. In Experiment 1, two groups of listeners are exposed to newly created French accents in which certain vowels harmonize or disharmonize, respectively, to the rounding of the preceding vowel. Despite the (...) cross-linguistic predominance of vowel harmony over disharmony, the two groups adapt equally well to both accents, suggesting that this typological difference is not reflected in perceptual learning. Experiment 2 further explores the mechanism underlying this type of phonological learning. Participants are exposed to an accent in which some vowels harmonize and others disharmonize, yielding an increased featural complexity. They adapt less well to this regularity, showing that adaptation to novel accents involves feature-based inferences. (shrink)

The context of a linguisticexpression is defined as everything outside theexpression itself that is necessary forunambiguous interpretation of the expression.As meaning can be conveyed either by theimplicit, shared context or by the explicitform of the expression, the degree ofcontext-dependence or ``contextuality'' ofcommunication will vary, depending on thesituation and preferences of the languageproducer. An empirical measure of thisvariation is proposed, the ``formality'' or``F-score'', based on the frequencies ofdifferent word classes. Nouns, adjectives,articles and prepositions are more frequent inlow-context or (...) ``formal'' types of expression;pronouns, adverbs, verbs and interjections aremore frequent in high-context styles. Thismeasure adequately distinguishes differentgenres of language production using data forDutch, French, Italian, and English. Factoranalyses applied to data in 7 differentlanguages produce a similar factor as the mostimportant one. Both the data and thetheoretical model suggest that contextualitydecreases when unambiguous understandingbecomes more important or more difficult toachieve, when the separation in space, time orbackground between the interlocutors increases,and when the speaker is male, introvertedand/or academically educated. (shrink)

'Samuel Beckett and Contemporary French Philosophy' explores the productive relationship between literature and philosophy, tracing the key ideas that inform Beckett's work and the ways in which these ideas are central to the French philosophy that developed in Beckett's wake. Forged within a similar cultural nexus both writer and philosophers pursue questions of epistemology and ontology within an exploration of the nature and function of language. Reacting against the rule-bound parameters of conceptual frameworks such as empiricism and (...) structuralism, the chapter argues that both Beckett and key French philosophers such as Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze and Blanchot seek to establish an understanding of subjectivity that takes into consideration the somatic and the contingent within the context of writing. (shrink)

‟Small or Large Coffee?”: A Few Aspects Related to the Analysis of a Language Act Captured in a Broader Temporality in the Context of an Exolingual Professional Training. We are interested in the form of the interaction that takes place between a chef and an allophone apprentice in a French restaurant, through the comparative analysis of one language act, a coffee proposal, captured by a camera on four occasions, from the first day of training to the (...) fourth month of the apprentice's employment. This data set allows us to observe the evolving character of the “interactional bricolage” and its inscription in two temporalities which are combined, that of production-reception and that of language acquisition, at the same time as it underlines the implications of the exolinguistic character of the situation for the role of the apprentice master. (shrink)

The research conducted in this article is aimed at analyzing color symbols in Russian, French and Chinese linguistic cultures using the analysis of phraseology and proverbs. The research methodology is based on a comparative analysis of phraseological units and proverbs containing color components in these languages. In the course of the study, both common and unique features in the color symbolism of each of the linguistic cultures under consideration were identified. Through a comparative analysis of phraseology and proverbs in (...) different languages, it was possible to better understand how color embodies cultural norms, worldview and historical contexts in each nation. This allowed us to see which aspects of color are particularly significant for each culture and what associations and symbolic meanings are associated with them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of differences and similarities in the interpretation of color in the idiomatic expressions of each language. This allows us to understand which cultural and historical factors form unique views and ideas about color in each of the linguistic cultures under consideration. The study also highlights that the interpretation of color symbols in idiomatic expressions depends on the cultural and historical contexts of each language. Idioms are a reflection of the collective consciousness and worldview of the people, and the study of color phenomena in idioms helps to better understand national identity and linguistic evolution. In addition, the study found that the red color can acquire different meanings and connotations in different languages, despite common dictionary definitions. This indicates that the use and attitude towards the color red depends on the cultural and historical characteristics of each language group. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that it combines linguistic analysis with the analysis of cultural characteristics and uses the methodology of synergetic symbolism. This approach allows us to understand how the interaction of different colors creates new symbolic meanings and associations specific to each culture. (shrink)

Vision and the gaze are key issues in the analysis of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism. In recent radical theory, generally, and French theory in particular, vision has been seen as a means of control. But this view is often unnuanced. It bypasses questions such as: Why is it that contemporary theories have been so critical of vision, and generous towards listening (in psychoanalysis) and language (in philosophy)? This collection of original essays brings together historical studies and contemporary theoretical (...) perspectives on vision. The historical papers focus in turn on Ancient Greece, medieval theology, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. These historical studies are themselves thoroughly informed by poststructuralist theory. They provide a rigorous background for several new, exciting articles on vision and its bearings for feminism, race, sexual orientation, film and art. This collection is the first of its kind in juxtaposing historical and contemporary. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the interaction between affect and language as articulated in the works of Theodor W. Adorno and Julia Kristeva, sometimes in inchoate and non-explicit ways. Language is always in transit, exile, and dispossession. All language is the language of another, or the other, and precisely because of this, it is the site of dissenting and conflicting affect. In this context, my paper traces a missed but necessary dialogue between Adorno and (...) Kristeva. Adorno’s diagnosis of failed subjective inwardness, first presented in his book on Kierkegaard, was sustained throughout Adorno’s entire oeuvre, to the very end, in his posthumous 1969 Aesthetic Theory. I will explicate Adorno’s forced collapsing of subjective interiority into a negative space that opens up aesthetic emancipatory potential. In what follows I place Adorno’s negativity of subjective inwardness and the aesthetic potential after the fact of its destruction in dialogue with the writings of Kristeva, who has likewise diagnosed a subjective interiority of negativity but framed the latter in terms of the female, abjection and maternity. I conclude by placing Kristeva’s work in conversation with Adorno’s philosophy of the language of music, as one example of their shared framework for aesthetic emancipatory experience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary creation susceptible both to “anxieties (...) of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical RefutationsMarina Berzins McCoyAristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations. Scott Schreiber. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. pp. 240. $68.50, hardcover; $22.95, paperback.Scott Schreiber's Aristotle on False Reasoning is the first full-length English commentary on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations in the last century. Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations is a text that has received relatively (...) little attention in the last century of scholarship, despite a revival of interest in other aspects of Aristotle's work concerned with the nature of good argument and rhetoric. (The 1995 French translation and commentary by Loius-Andre Dorion is a notable exception.) Schreiber finds the primary reason [End Page 92] for inattention to this text to lie in the tendency of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to resolve problems in reasoning through linguistic clarification (xiv). Aristotle's claim that some errors are due to language while others lie outside the realm of linguistic error is not one to which contemporary analytic philosophy has been particularly sympathetic. The Sophistical Refutations has been neglected in light of contemporary logic. Schreiber's book attempts to return to Aristotle's project on his own philosophical terms, in order to better understand why Aristotle classified errors in reasoning as he did. Schreiber's approach is to examine each of the twelve types of false reasoning that Aristotle lays out in the Sophistical Refutations, with particular attention to Aristotle's examples, in order to understand the principles behind the overall system.Schreiber argues that Aristotle had good reason for separating errors due to language from those outside of language: Aristotle's classification of error is tied to his notion of the resolution of false arguments. To understand how to resolve a sophistical argument, we must first understand how it could have been believed to be true. Since Aristotle's aim in the Sophistical Refutations is to show why certain sorts of arguments are deceptive to some who hear them, his method of explaining errors is less a pure examination of their logical errors than of how such erroneous arguments can deceive. Aristotle is concerned with two types of problems with sophistical argument: first, why such an argument is false; and second, why it might appear to be true. Schreiber shows that most commentators have not given sufficient attention to the second of these concerns in their attempts to understand Aristotle's taxonomy. As Schreiber puts it, "Examples of false reasoning are unified into groups and differentiated into subgroups not by the nature of the confusions that they engender but by the different ways that confusion is cleared up" (54). False reasoning is due not only to mistakes in logic, but also to mistaken beliefs about language and reality. Careful examination of Aristotle's thinking allows us to see the importance of beliefs about the world in good and bad argument.For the most part, Schreiber's examinations of Aristotle's examples are lucid and helpful in understanding both the particular example at hand as well as the general picture of Aristotle's classifications. Schreiber continually returns to the importance of Aristotle's own view of language and argument in contrast to the approaches of contemporary linguistics and logic. For example, while some twentieth-century scholars have attempted to explain Aristotle's distinction between homonymy and amphiboly in terms of the contemporary distinction between semantics and syntax, [End Page 93] Aristotle seems to distinguish the two according to whether a general predicate signifies many particulars regardless of context, or in a propositional context (31). In the end, Schreiber does not think that the categories of homonymy and amphiboly can be completely distinct, even on Aristotle's own grounds, but still finds the categories useful. Schreiber is also careful to provide criticism of Aristotle's categories when warranted, both defending Aristotle against his contemporary critics when he thinks they have misunderstood him, and pointing out genuine weaknesses in Aristotle's arguments.Schreiber's book is clearly intended as a response to the contemporary Anglo-American reading of Aristotle. Much of the book assumes at least some familiarity with the ways in... (shrink)

This essay locates Jean-Luc Nancy's analyses, developed in relation to three invented terms, expeausition, excription, sexistence, in a threefold context: between Immanuel Kant on experience and Heidegger on existence; with Derrida on rethinking life and death ( lavielamort); and as a response to the alteration in phenomenology consequent on a transposition of key themes out of the German speaking context of the analyses of Husserl and Heidegger into the French language context of the French (...) reception. An intensification ( survie) of life forces may arrive in a ‘living on’ ( survivre) where thought processes only partially brought to expression in the lifetimes of their originators acquire precision and definition in moments of extremity, danger and horror, adding a fourth dimension to the initial three. (shrink)

Senshu University has hosted many international conferences on medieval English literature - primarily on Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland - as well as in the related fields of Old Germanic, medieval French and Renaissance Italian literature. These international collaborations inform and contribute to the present volume, which addresses the heritage bequeathed to medieval English language and literature by the classical world.<BR> This volume explores the development of medieval English literature in light of contact with Germanic and Old Norse (...) cultures, on the one hand, and Romance languages, on the other. The book includes a comparative study of <I>Beowulf in the Germanic context, discusses aspects of <I>Piers Plowman and its tradition, and offers philological approaches to Chaucer (especially his <I>Troilus and Criseyde). The articles assembled here collectively suggest how the torches of classical learning were carried from continental Europe to illuminate the pages of medieval English literature. (shrink)

The essay offers a decolonial reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà, the ancient legendary Yorùbá African messenger and interpreter of the spiritual tradition of Ifá with the aim to address the problem of hegemonic languages (such as English and French) and epistemic bias that have affected the Yorùbá intellectual tradition. The essay argues that reflection on the deep history of Yorùbá and the applied philosophy of Ọ̀rúnmìlà can better clarify the problem of language and epistemic injustices that European (...) modernity has generated in modern Africa. The essay therefore explores what could be described as the interaction of nature-culture in the Yorùbá African intellectual tradition that continues to be silenced and distorted by imposed hegemonic languages and cultures. Through a new reading of the thought of Ọ̀rúnmìlà within the context of Ifá, the essay highlights how the problem of language and epistemic injustices disrupts the continuity of inherited African philosophical and historical traditions in modern times. Ultimately, such reading aims at revealing the contribution of the Yorùbá intellectual tradition to the global philosophical and historical discourse. (shrink)

A broad exploration of Irigaray’s philosophy of life and living. Featuring a highly accessible essay from Irigaray herself, this volume explores her philosophy of life and living. Life-thinking, an important contemporary trend in philosophy and in women’s and gender studies, stands in contrast to philosophy’s traditional grounding in death, exemplified in the work of philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Schopenhauer. The contributors to Thinking Life with Luce Irigaray consider Irigaray’s criticisms of the traditional Western philosophy of death, including its (...) either-or dualisms and binary logic, as well as some of Irigaray’s “solutions” for cultivating life. The book is comprehensive in its analyses of Irigaray’s relationship to classical and contemporary philosophers, writers, and artists, and produces extremely fruitful intersections between Irigaray and figures as diverse as Homer and Plato; Alexis Wright, the First-Nations novelist of Australia; and twentieth-century French philosophers like Sartre, Badiou, Deleuze, and Guattari. It also develops Irigaray’s relationship to the arts, with essays on theater, poetry, architecture, sculpture, and film. “This is a very timely text; it places Irigaray scholarship in conversation with the lively field of feminist philosophies of life, and this is a really wonderful, fruitful match. The collection itself contains many marvelous pieces. Luce Irigaray’s essay is strong and pithy—she reiterates a number of her important ideas, in accessible language, and places them in the context of pertinent questions in feminism.” — Sabrina L. Hom, coeditor of Thinking with Irigaray. (shrink)

The introduction and tracking of individuals over extended discourse, known as referential movement, is a central feature of coherence, and accounts for 'about every third word of discourse'. Located at the intersection of pragmatics and grammar, reference is now proving a rich and enduring source of insight into second language development. The challenge for L2 learners involves navigating the selection and positioning of reference in the target language, continually shifting and balancing the language used to maintain coherence, (...) while remaining acutely sensitive to the discourse and social context. The present volume focuses on how L2 learners meet that challenge, bringing together both eminent and up-and-coming researchers in the field of L2 acquisition. The chapters address a range of problems in SLA (e.g. form-function mapping, L1 influence, developmental trajectories), and do so in relation to various theoretical approaches to reference (e.g. Accessibility Theory, Givenness Hierarchy). The global outlook of these studies relate to the L2 acquisition of English, French, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish and cover a diverse range of situational contexts including heritage language learning, English as a Medium of Instruction, and the development of sociolinguistic competence. (shrink)

The word solidarity is a borrowing from the French solidarité, which until the nineteenth century had the restricted legal meaning of a contractual obligation. I argue that in the pre-revolutionary decades, a newly born French lexeme was much closer to what solidarity would mean for modern societies, at least if we accept the agonistic context of most phenomena of solidarity: ‘esprit de corps’, taken from the military language and changed into a combat concept by the Philosophes. (...) A ‘corps’ in French, among other definitions, is an organised group with its own cohesion, its own interests, and its instinct of preservation. In this article, I argue that the study of the birth of ‘esprit de corps’, and the French Revolution attempt to universalise the concept, can shed some light on later debates on democratic forms of solidarity. If solidarity is a form of esprit de corps, and because of the military origin of the latter, solidarity should be considered as a ‘war machine’, an agonistic union rather than an all-encompassing and vague ideal of global fraternity. (shrink)

In the English-language context, Benjamin's influence continues to grow, along with the already massive secondary literature on his writings. This collection brings together a selection of the most critically important items published in the literature on Benjamin, across the full range of his cultural-theoretical interests, from all periods of the reception of his writings, but focusing upon the most recent, to produce a near-definitive overview of the best critical literature. The main national contexts of reception represented are German, (...) French and Anglo-American, but also included are some important items from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Latin America and East-Asia. These are mainly in English translation, with many new translations appearing here for the first time. (shrink)